SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Arijan Kurbasic, the manager of the War Hostel Sarajevo in the Bosnian capital, knows that his idea of hospitality is not to everyone’s taste and is ready to relax the house rules a bit.

He will, for example, turn down the volume on a sound system that, day and night, fills the place with the din of gunfire and explosions.

Getting to sleep can still be a challenge: There are no beds, only thin mattresses on the floor with no pillows or sheets, and heavy, scratchy blankets that create the feeling of sleeping with a dead horse.

The décor is hardly soothing — lots of guns and, in one room, a poster screaming “Death” and “The End.”

And while other hotels offer luxury suites and sweeping views of Sarajevo’s old town to guests looking for a particularly memorable stay, Mr. Kurbasic offers the ultimate in self-deprivation — “the bunker,” a windowless dungeon room so hellishly and deliberately uncomfortable that, he said, “it is insane to want to sleep there.”

A former Sarajevo tour guide, Mr. Kurbasic, 27, said he had quickly realized that what many tourists really wanted to know about was the glorious city’s agonies during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

“I decided to give people what they wanted,” he said.

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Arijan Kurbasic, the manager of the War Hostel Sarajevo, asks guests to call him “Zero One,” his father’s code name during the war years.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

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“The bunker,” a windowless dungeon room in the war hostel, comes complete with artificial smoke and loud recordings of mortar and gunfire.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

The hospitality industry’s term for what he offers is “dark tourism,” a niche but growing global market focused on places where terrible things happened.

But it was also in Bosnia that an early version of dark tourism took a particularly sinister turn, said Zijad Jusufovic, a survivor of the city’s wartime siege who now leads idiosyncratic tours of Sarajevo’s sites.

“This is attraction number one for dark tourism,” he said, standing amid a cluster of rocks high in the hills overlooking the city.

War tourists with a criminal blood lust, mostly Orthodox Christian fanatics from Russia and Greece, used to go there to take potshots, for a fee, with sniper rifles and even antiaircraft guns at Muslim residents scurrying for cover in the city below.

Another place Mr. Jusufovic likes to take visitors is Yugoslavia’s first private hotel, a mountain getaway for romantic trysts that, now a ruin, was used by Serb forces to pound the city with artillery.

At the war hostel, Mr. Kurbasic said his aim was not to create nostalgia for Europe’s worst bout of bloodletting since World War II but simply to let guests, particularly younger ones, get a small idea of the discomfort and deprivations of wartime.

“Millennials come and say, ‘This is so cool,’” he said. “But it is not cool. It is not a game. If you grow up thinking war is a game, you will make some very bad decisions.”

Housed on two floors of his parents’ large, ramshackle house near the former front line, the hostel has a communal room that can sleep six guests on the floor and a more private room for single or double occupancy.

The bunker downstairs, explained Mr. Kurbasic, is for “very specific people who want to go the extra mile.”

Designed to recreate the feel of a forest shelter for fighters, it is cheap — just 20 euros, about $22.50, per person.

The cacophony of simulated war in the bunker is relentless, and cannot be switched off. Then there is the smoke, pumped out by a theatrical machine to create a choking fog.

The floor is made from packed mud, while the walls and ceiling consist of crudely cut logs. Sleeping, which is rare, is done on hard wooden boards without a mattress.

To add authenticity and detach guests from their peaceful, comfortable lives, cellphones, jewelry and watches are banned in the bunker.

It has a windup clock, but it’s broken. Mr. Kurbasic sets it to the time guests arrive, meaning that since the hands don’t move, time grinds to a standstill and leaves visitors to fret about why their ordeal is passing so slowly.

There are no windows and no lights. Guests are given a beat-up flashlight with batteries that are about to run out. That, Mr. Kurbasic said, ensures that they use it sparingly and get used to sitting in the dark.

He greets guests wearing military fatigues, black boots, a helmet and a flak jacket, and asks them not to use his real name but to call him Zero One, his father’s code name during the conflict.

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A picture of Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb general who was later found guilty of war crimes, on a building in the Serbian part of Sarajevo.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

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Buildings on what used to be the front line in Sarajevo still carry the scars of the conflict.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

Most of his visitors are from Europe, Australia and the United States, many of them too young to remember gruesome television images of Sarajevo’s misery during a 1,425-day siege by Serbian forces entrenched in the mountains surrounding the city.

“Locals are definitely not interested,” said Mr. Kurbasic, who was a young child during the war. “They lived it every day and want to forget.”

Mr. Jusufovic, the tour guide, said Bosnians started to be more open to war tourism once the authorities realized that there was money to be made.

A Muslim family whose home near the Sarajevo airport was the starting point of a wartime tunnel dug under the runway began making a small fortune selling tickets to tourists who wanted to visit what had been the only relatively safe way in and out of the besieged city.

Called the Tunnel of Hope, it was taken over by the government in 2013, and is now one of the city’s most popular attractions.

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The “Tunnel of Hope,” under the Sarajevo airport runway, was once the only safe escape route from the city. It is now a popular tourist attraction.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

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Tourists at the Tunnel of Hope museum looking at a room depicting how people lived during the war.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

Marketing the war, however, is a tricky business, not least because there are still so many arguments about who did what to whom during fighting that pitched neighbors and friends into fratricidal conflict.

The authorities in Sarajevo, said Mr. Jusufovic, a nonpracticing Muslim, “only want to show one thing: ‘We are the victims and you are guilty.’”

Mr. Kurbasic, the hostel manager, avoids such quarrels and refuses to say whether he is a Muslim, a Serb or a Croat, Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups.

“I’m really sick and tired of all the divisions in this country,” he said.

His only message, he said, is that guests should look at Sarajevo, now a vibrant, cosmopolitan city that hosts a celebrated annual film festival and is full of bars and hip clubs, and remember that “what happened here can happen wherever there are people.”

He has had few takers for the bunker, but demand has been reasonably strong for his less traumatic rooms.

He said he had initially considered cutting off the water in the hostel and forcing guests to collect it in buckets from outside, as most people in Sarajevo had to do during the war. But he decided that this would be going too far.

He also installed Wi-Fi, bowing to what he said was his young clientele’s one nonnegotiable demand.

An American guest had no problem with the constant sound of gunfire and sleeping on the floor without sheets, he said.

“But when I told her there is no internet, she said, ‘I’m leaving.’”

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A view of Sarajevo from Yugoslavia’s first private hotel, a mountain getaway once used by Serb forces to pound the city with artillery shells.CreditLaura Boushnak for The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: No Bed, No Breakfast. But the Gunfire Is Divine. . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe